Chapter 1

Prolegomena to Any Future Noumenology

David C. Braun

© 2006 David C. Braun

Chapter I

[A.  The (internal) system of knowledge; being and consistency:]

  1

            [i.  The formal system:] 

One may begin with certain a priori definitions the delineation of a system of knowledge, a development of definitions and propositions derived therefrom.  In such a system, one can take a true statement relative to the system to be one in agreement with the definitions, a false one relative to the system being the contrary.  Contradictory statements are statements not in agreement (but disagreeing) with one another.  A coherent system is one wherein definitions do not contradict one another.  A definition is true relative to another definition if it is in agreement with that other, false relative to another if it disagrees.  A proposition is contained in another if its definition is included tinder the other.  “Existing thing” is that which is, i.e., not-nothing; “not to exist” conveys the opposite.

From these one can derive certain propositions.  A system not coherent is false relative to the definitions within, as the definitions are not in agreement; a coherent system is true relative to the definitions within.  A coherent system can be called an internally true system for purposes hereof; in such a system truth cannot contradict truth, as the definitions in such a system are coherent.  Valid reasoning in this system is in combinations of meanings of the definitions (and derivative propositions), e.g., by showing that the derivative subject is a member of the original subject.  Schematic representation of this proposition, for example, can exhibit its validity and is useful to validate the above discourse.  (Other modi besides the above could be shown, e.g., arguments from the contrapositive.)  In an internally true system of definitions, the process of reasoning outlined is noncontradictory.   No thing can exist and not exist under the same conditions in a coherent system, which the system of being is; in the system of being, truth cannot contradict truth.  Being cannot come from non-being, which, alone, does not admit of any being.

The above describes a system the validity of which beyond the limits of its own definitions is not established, so that what was asserted of being would be applicable only within that particular system.  However, at its root lies the harmonic[1] proposition that truth cannot contradict truth, from which followed (inter alia) an important proposition, that ex nihilo nihil fit.  Wherever the harmony allowing those two propositions reigns, the above system applies.

2

[A. (cont’d.):]

                [ii.  The material system:]

Materially, one can divide the whole of human experience into three levels:  the self, the environment as phenomenal outer limit and that which lies beyond.  The self’s interior transfers its labors to the environment, expressing inner meanings by use of symbols in the environment and of instruments to carry out its purposes.  To some extent the environment affects the self-conscious within, but the self is not wholly so determined, as will be shown below.[2]  It seems there is that which lies beyond the outer limit of changing phenomena in which the experience of the self is limited.  Evidently the latter had a beginning, and the former is likely to be transitory, though that has not yet been proved.

The mind can understand each item of the environment, taken in itself, but not the whole or its order, taken in their origins.  Yet there cannot be contradictory things (so as to annihilate the being of each other) operating in the world, or contradictory “truths” correctly so called.  For, on natural grounds, the world would thus be nullified or altered and, on epistemological grounds, “false” is defined as that which is contrary to the true and thus real.  Hence truth could not contradict truth or the real world.  (The void state would be one on a par with dreamless sleep, in which no experience is claimed.  Yet definitions and experience are claimed, and such claims ate totally nonexistent in a void.  Hence there is, at least within and for consciousness, a thing real.)

3

[B.  The legitimacy of the terms “void” and “nonvoid:”]

The argument herein depends on a concept of the void oft encountered in philosophic arguments but oft rejected in arguments of a positivist bent on a charge of violation of the syntactic law of the use of negation.  This law, according to the latter, allows one to use negation purely as a function; what one who speaks of the nothing as if it were some sort of subject is really trying to say is “for every value of x, there is no x.”  As use of “the nothing” as a subject for predicates involves use of a “pure” function-word as a thing-word, the use is therefore argued to be syntactically illegitimate and to produce syntactic nonsense.

What state is achieved or found when, for every value of x, there is no x, i.e., when an absolute negation is performed or encountered?  This is not a mere thought-experiment; one encounters, after a fashion, such a state of affairs within conscious phenomenally observed life in states of what I call “dreamless sleep.”  I can then analogically posit (e.g., of a hypothetical transcendent situation) that state wherein, for every value of x, there is no x.  That state is of interest and, as elsewhere made to appear, of no little importance to the resolution of such questions as are treated herein about causation, being and transcendence.[3]  I treat elsewhere the expected similar question of the legitimacy of usage of “being” as a subject-word, not as mere function-word,[4] though it should be clear from this discussion in what direction such an argument will move and what chance of success it will have.

4

[C.  Harmony and causation:]

That harmony can be caused by harmony only, and that it cannot come from, or be caused by, contradiction, may be seen from the following.  Given a positive harmony truly so, firstly, it must not be affected by the void, which is of a harmonic negativity without power to affect the harmonic entity. Hence, in general, only a harmonic entity can affect the being. And as there is nothing to foreclose any contact or union of the harmonic with the disharmonic “void esse,” or of the latter with the harmonic negativity, in the harmonic negativity of the void known there was never any disharmonic “void esse.” Consequently, harmony could come only from harmony.  Further, if harmonic entity has a beginning, it is a harmonic beginning; otherwise it is and is not begun, and is thus not harmonic, which is false.  The newly begun harmony is passive with relation to the harmony in its beginning and receptive thereof, so that the latter harmony is neither of the formerly-mentioned nor of a harmonic void. Nor could the latter harmony (i.e., of the beginning) be one with contradiction in itself or its origin, ad infinitum. Thus harmony can come only from harmony; from harmony can come only harmony.

“Every event has a cause” means more than “every event has a harmonic existent cause.” The latter merely specifies the type of cause.  The problem suggestible is that a harmonic entity follows on an ordinally prior disharmonic contradiction without any connection such as cause, so that one cannot say that every event has a cause without exception.  Now the harmonic consistent entity is and can be so only by consistency, not only of singulars, but also within their world, so that its condition for occurring is that it not take place in that which to it (or in general) is disharmonic.  The nothing, to the extent it is consistent, continues only to nothing.  After (in an ordinal or positional sense) the posited end of disharmony there is no disharmony, and the later “moments”’ nothing is consistent with that accompanying the hypothesized first “moment.”  The “moment” and its sequel are mediated at the point of passage and, in that point of union, the nothing of a moment “doth naught,” not only later but contemporaneously with the “moment of becoming harmonic being.”  Hence by analogy all harmonic events real must ‘be caused by another, as opposed to springing up on their own (contrary to harmony).[5]

5

[D.  Language:]

          [i.  The general issue:]

This is a quest for knowledge, dependent on observation, or abstraction from the givenness of the phenomenal system, the reality of which one seeks to ascertain, and reason, or synthesis of the abstractions according to the rules of logic, which are harmonic rules for the combination of definitions (or abstractions), which combination occurs according to the definitions’ implications.  The problems conceivable are the internal and external legitimacy vel non of the givens and their combinations.  As those initial givens are definitions of the phenomenal order, the subject of the general question, that of the legitimacy of the givens and their combination must be within the realm of definition, wherein there would be no problem but for the problem that can be raised by definition’s relation to language.

6

[D.  (cont’d.):]

                [ii.  The same, cont’d.; translating from language to reality (or language as reflecting reality):]

Definitional givens are, of themselves, the point of origin for discourse, insofar as the ultimate question is of their independent truth. As givens, they are to be accepted as to their internal content, initially.[6]  The external objection is that language does not reflect reality as such, but that it is relative to the user, and that the forms are strictly conventions of usage, or sui generis, so to speak. Individual words do not necessarily refer to things, but have lives of their own, reflecting ways of speech and dividing thinking, conceived solely as language in the literal sense.  The groupings cannot reflect reality because they assume the form of language to show a form in reality, which cannot be compared to a descriptive language because it cannot be conceived extralinguistically.

If that were true, reality as given could yet be thought of as a language of sorts, even as one can arrange percepts to convey a message without explicit use of words. As one can translate from one language to another, so one can translate terms to perceptual givens, even if givens are the abstracta of consciousness (e.g., by the medium of words), which are the definitions lying behind the surface lexicography and grammar, definitions with their own implicit rules.  [One does not speak of “a solid country” as one does of a “solid wall” or a “solid defense.”  Given that “solid” means “not likely to collapse under attack or pressure,” the idea of “a solid country” is not unintelligible, even if it violates lexicographical or grammatical (as opposed to definitional qua conceptual) rules.]  But cannot one have in mind images without words?  (One thinks of the dream of Baron Kekulé leading to the determination of the structure of benzene.)  As one can, the objection is without merit.  For one can compare a mental picture with the res as one can a photograph with what it depicts.  Thereby one conceives of reality extralinguistically.

Further, language is shaped by ideas (e.g., “Renaissance” was shaped by the idea, whether true or false, of a revival of classical culture in a secular context, against the supposed barbarity and “darkness” of the prior, or “medieval” period).  Any language’s being learned depends on observation, or analysis, and reason, or synthesis.  Without the constant referent a parent could not raise a child, especially cross-culturally, into its knowledge.  Lastly, it would be my task to show the independence of the harmony pervading the forms as unanticipated harmony, so that I may speak of the world’s form.

7

[D. (cont’d.):]

                [iii.  Real (or logical) versus merely linguistic categories; again, for intertranslatability:]

Nouns as subjects of active verbs often stand for such philosophical abstracta as substance, cause, attribute and the like, thereby suggesting to one whose tongue has them the categories linguistically in and about the subject of the verb.  (Is “subjectivity” itself part of the linguistic undergirding of the philosophical idea of causation or of substance?)  But what of the nothing, neither substance nor activity?  Could not speech about causation be possible even in a language wherein no subject, taken as a separate word or as implied, is grammatically identifiable?  In a Native American language taken as an example of a tongue with a subjectless grammar, Nootka, one still finds the particle or particles capable of representing a subject, e.g., in tl‘imsh-ya-‘is-ita-‘itl-ma.[7]  I stressed “active verbs” and probably should have noted further “in the active voice” because the passive voice and the copula all too often carry in philosophical discourse grammatical subjects that are not causal agents or substances.

One might attack the category of activity as a purely verbal (as opposed to a real, translinguistic) category.  But activity is more likely a more-than-verbal category, even with regard to the following:  Given the harmony, except through some other to which change can be attributed, a thing remains self-identical; thence I get to the notion of causation, from which I can derive any idea of activity, i.e., that by which change is caused or thing produced.  [If activity is but a verbal category, it names nothing but a type of word (i.e., a verb).  But language must refer to the world in some way; otherwise it would be idle, meaningless babble.]  There is indeed change in the world.  That responsible for change in the otherwise persistent, harmonic world must be a real activity, not merely a way of talking about talking about something.

A related question is whether “subject” and “predicate” are related to reality or alone to the language in which they are found.  Logical and grammatical subjects are not fungible; one can say “Sunday is the first day of the week” but reject the idea that “Sunday” is a logical subject.  [The importance of this question lies in the dictum of Kant that being can never be a real predicate, a point important in criticism of the Anselmian argument for God.  If “subject” and “predicate” were without basis save in certain languages, there would be no point in Kant’s dictum as an ontological point.  Rather, it would be a rule for using certain languages.]  In the persistence-harmony I find what is to remain.  That I may call the “logical subject” I can describe.  The temporary relations of the thing and the (more or less) permanent special conditions thereof (e.g., its blueness, heaviness, density) I could call “predicates” referring to it or taking it by parts.  I caution the reader that “logical subject” need not be represented exclusively by whatever words correspond to nouns in Western languages.  That long-lasting, stable events might be represented in some languages by words that do not work like nouns or that nouns might in some languages be used for fleeting events does not detract from the argument above.

One might answer the charge that language is relative and translation impossible by noting instances of historical translation or a pointing and naming activity (how foreign languages are now taught in some schools).  But not every “object” identified by a word is the same.  Color is a notorious example; the Anglophone names a variety of colors whereas some languages select but two, three or four colors.  Other continua might similarly be represented by different tongues, thus:

_____________________________(___________)_____________________________________________

----------------------------------------------------[--------------]-------------------------------------------------------------

(_____)        (Language A)

[---------]   [Language B]

The horizontal line herein represents a continuum in question; the vertical perhaps one of those common objects to which one points.  It should therefore be possible for another (hypothetical) person to refer sometimes to a description of something that may or may not be clearly what I intend in using my word.  But one might ask about what one is included to call objects, i.e., the discontinuous, the graspable which one can hold, of which one can clearly say, “This is a (. . .),” and be clearly understood if the (hypothetical) hearer is not willfully dense.  Even then a problem can arise:  What if the (hypothetical) hearer, on seeing the labeled, divides object-classes differently and thinks the speaker has given a new name for something not intended in the class (e.g., for want of distinction between dog and wolf).  The grabbable and discrete might fit yet another continuum.

But as a partisan of the prospect of translation I should reply that in both cases I refer to a continuum possible with regard to both languages in the confrontation, as witness the diagram.  A linguistic relativist must begin with the assumption of an external world of languages real-unto-themselves, whose speakers’ means of dividing the world is no less privileged than that of immediate consciousness, in the absence of which linguistic relativism means simply that concepts Kant would have denominated the categories of the understanding facilitate my thinking the world as I do, not as necessary conditions given by the understanding, but as externally bestowed through the instrument of language.  This allows an abdication from serious inquiry as to the existence of any further ground for belief in causation, so one is led to believe.  Such an attitude must overlook not only the success of scientific inquiry pursued using the category, of causation but also the facts both of the harmony and the nothing or unchanging allowing its invocation.  (I know not only that causation works but under what conditions it works; this I add to avoid a charge of advocating mere pragmatism, which I elsewhere repudiate.)[8]

One’s sense of time is argued to be conditioned by the language wherein one learned to speak of it; Western thought takes it to be linear, nonrecurring, because the tense structure of Western Indo-European languages involves a clear demarcation of tenses.  A different linguistic background may evidence different ideas of time affecting one’s ideas of causation (inter alia).  I am invited again to conclude that causation is but a linguistic category I impose on the totality of phenomena simply because my Western origins so predispose me.  This line of thought, already answered seminally above, has the added fault of placing things in wrong order.  Supposing, for example, that time is determined by an order of ground and consequent, dependent on causation.[9]

I do not mean to say that language has no effect on thought, either in forming its categories or in specific application; much less do I mean to deny the proper role of study of both in philosophy.  Nor do I mean to deny that language affects (e.g.) one’s concept of time.  But I mean to call attention to two things one should recall in attempting to draw philosophical results from the linguistic shaping of thought.  First, other elements (e.g., the given, harmony) have their own roles in the history of development of thought, roles ignored at risk of losing touch with reality.  Second, there may not be as much harm as has been suggested in the framing of concepts admittedly affected by language, provided that (i) they are kept as consistent as possible and (ii) they are kept as true to definitional givens as possible.

8

[D. (cont’d.):]

                [iv.  The intra-material problem of the conceptually sound:]

Combination of definitions entails a dual problem of the legitimacy of its synthesis, which can be read as “formal” logic, of the elemental givens, including the abstracta of harmony and of “material” facts.  To the extent that language may be concerned in the objections raised, the objections may be internal to the linguistic system of meanings or external thereto, once again.  Within the system the objections may be severed into intra-material and formal-material, as the intra-formal is part of definitions’ givenness initially, and, ultimately, the general question.  The intra-material is concerned with the improper importation of terms from one category into another, determination of which arguably should be made by linguistic analysis.  Successful analysis examines ‘the harmony or disharmony of the constitution of concepts as definitions, not as lexicographical conventions.  Thus, “Saturday is in the chair” is conceptually unsound; the same cannot be said of mind as a separate entity given free choice.

                [v.  The alleged problem of formal statements in material mode:]

The internal formal-material combination problem and the problem of the formation of ideas referring to that which is outside the system are related by their turning on the formal-material or logico-factual dichotomy.  The internal objection is that metaphysical ideas are confused statements about words (i.e., formal statements) cast in the material mode, so that one’s manner of speech is elevated into thinghood.  Thus “Five is a number” arguably misleads to speculation about number as if it were an entity when what is really said is “‘Five’ is a number-word.”  The problem lies in the concept “speech in the formal mode,” taken to be merely about words, but actually covering definitional logic and the discussion of concepts as well as lexicographical and grammatical matters.  “Five” as word represents a logical ordering or synthesis and the resulting concept, which I call “number.”  Thus it is possible for such a sentence to have two levels, one concerning lexicographical fact, one concerning the thing expressed, i.e., the definition or concept.  This does not bar use of either as long as I do not manipulate transition to cause confusion and as long as the definitions are harmonic and allowable as meaningful.  That any given “metaphysical” term is actually speech about language masquerading as speech about some type of res (sensations, phenomena, objects, whatever) is something that must be shown in each individual case.  And, in individual cases, there are concepts that thinkers of that ilk call “speech about language” that really are about some at least hypothetical object, as was noted in the discussion about “nothing” and the experience of dreamless sleep and about the “not-nothing” denominated as being (§3).  No actual sensum, including that of self-consciousness (or “self-effects”) or that even of any independent harmony, can fail to be an object of object-language’s appropriate reference.

---

[1] “Harmony” can cover the internal harmony of one undifferentiated term and the interactional harmony of propositions in the system.  “Unanticipated harmony of positive terms” (infra, §§9, 12f, 15) refers to the complex of unanticipated uncontrolled harmony, i.e., independent harmony.  The harmony of the universal (infra, §27) is as that of the single term.  That of the argument below is of the conjunction of terms, of unity in harmony among themselves, as logic is not contrary to the identities covered by the law thereof.

[2]See §25, infra.

[3]See §§4, 9, 15, infra; cf. §1, supra.

[4]Cf. §15, infra

[5] See §10, infra, regarding time and ordinality. The sole formal rule of A=A+0 is the sole apodictic, a priori rule regarding the environment vis-à-vis the identity of A, as consideration of the question of an ice cube’s miraculous suspension in the midst of a hot blaze should reveal (cf. §28, n. 3, below). The question is one of interpretation; a competing one could be attempted if independent harmony be not encountered. For what privileges the waking (harmonic) world over that of dreams (disharmonic as it may be)? The point to finding independent harmony is to settle the question of proper interpretation of the world.

[6]Sensory incorrigibilia (to-wit: “I see x”) I herein call “definitions” just as it is defined that an isosceles triangle has three angles and three sides, two of which are of equal length.  Admittedly I can correct my earlier perceptions in the light of later ones.  But laws for correcting sensory reports can nullomodo account for my sensing as harmony what is contradiction.  That I think I see x, or that I dream x, or that I am now thinking, remembering, feeling emotively, etc., x is certainly in that at least trivial sense true, to the point of being beyond doubt.  With what can I oppose that, at this moment, I am sensing x, except by data of not-x? But that would be also part of the given.  So I should not fear purported “critiques of the given.”

[7]This example is taken from Benjamin Lee Whorf, Language, Thought and Reality (Cambridge, Mass. 1956), at 242-43.  The sentence, translated in the word-order of the Nootka language, is “cooking[’s]­-result[’s]-eating-doers go[es]-for he;” in ordinary English it would be translated as “He invites people to a feast.”

[8]For the general burden of this work, supporting the point. immediately preceding the parenthetical, see §§1 and 4, supra, and §§12 through 15, infra.  For the rejection of pragmatism, see §19, infra.

[9] See §9, infra.